- [Anna] Coming up (upbeat music) on "Great Lakes Now," the emerald ash borer has devastated forests in our region, but the trees are fighting back.

- It was really this moment of confusion.

How is this tree possibly here?

A surviving tree.

We knew it was big.

- [Anna] And restoring a sacred lake after generations of pollution.

- The Great Sea of the Ojibwe is this land here, was truly paradise for our people.

- [Announcer] This program was brought to you by the Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Hi, I'm Anna Sysling.

Welcome to "Great Lakes Now."

Invasive species have caused widespread damage in the Great Lakes region, both in the water and on land, but there's hope in the fight against one of these threats.

Dan Wanschura from the Points North podcast brings us the story.

- [Dan] This is Kathleen Knight and she's walking through a forest in central Ohio.

She's a research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, so she likes to say she gets paid to take walks like this.

- I have a moment almost every day in the field where I'm like, trees are awesome and amazing.

They do so many amazing things.

- In 2006, she walked through a forest in Ohio surrounded by big, beautiful ash trees, tall trunks, lush green canopies, a healthy forest.

She collected some data and headed out.

Then three years later, in 2009, Kathleen returned to that forest and found a completely different scene.

- We were initially struck when we even looked around, and that was kind of our moment of shock, saying, "Wow, they're all dead."

- Hundreds and hundreds of dead ash trees as far as the eye could see, all because of a small invasive bug called the emerald ash borer.

- It was some really depressing research early on, because we had all these beautiful ash forests, floodplains with huge ash trees, and then we watched all of these trees die.

We watched those ecosystems change.

- There were once billions of ash trees all over North America.

Ash trees filtered groundwater.

They gave habitat to all sorts of plants, animals, and insects.

Indigenous people depended on ash to make baskets.

Ash was used for things like baseball bats and handles for tools.

- To see it disappear so quickly and change so quickly, it is, it's heartbreaking.

It would've created a gallery here- - [Dan] But heartbroken or not, Kathleen and her colleagues had a job to do, so they gathered data from the dead ash trees.

They measured their trunks, looked for emerald ash borer exit holes, and then they headed back to their cars.

- We were pretty quiet on the walk back out, and as we're walking across the bridge, I think it was one of our interns who spotted the tree was like, "Hey, is that an ash?"

And we all stop and look at this tree and we're like, "That's an ash."

It's definitely an ash.

It's healthy.

It's full of green leaves.

It looks great.

It was really this moment of confusion.

How is this tree possibly here?

How is this possibly the existing after what we've seen all day long here?

We knew it was big.

We knew it was big to find a surviving tree.

- [Dan] Now they had to figure out why it survived, because that answer might save an entire species from extinction.

- [Announcer] No one knows exactly how the emerald ash- - [Dan] The emerald ash borer or EAB for short, was first found in North America, just outside Detroit, Michigan.

It was more than 20 years ago in 2002.

The little beetle arrived on wood packing material and cargo ships or airplanes from China.

From there, it spread quickly.

The bugs have wings and can fly short distances, but people are the main way they get around.

- [Announcer] Stop the spread of emerald ash borer.

Don't move firewood.

- [Dan] Now EAB is found in 36 states and 5 Canadian provinces.

Its population hits ash trees in waves.

Parts of the Great Lakes region are in a second wave right now.

- Have limestone near the surface.

- [Dan] Kathleen has seen the effects of that here in central Ohio.

- [Kathleen] So this is one of our larger ones.

It died too.

And you can actually see the canopy of the dead tree.

That's a very recently killed ash that died during the second wave.

And I'm gonna see if I can find some galleries here for you under the bark if I can peel back.

- [Dan] The real damage done by the emerald ash borer is done by its larvae.

They bore just under the bark and make these squiggly looking tunnels.

- [Kathleen] So as the emerald ash borers create these tunnels, if you get enough emerald ash borers, they basically cut off that circulatory system and girdle the tree and it can't get water and nutrients transported up to the canopy, and that kills the tree fairly quickly.

- As EAB devastated ash trees in North America, researchers scrambled to find a solution.

Early on they tried cutting down large swaths of trees to create a sort of fire break to stop the spread.

Then they tried insecticides.

Those can work to save a small number of trees or maybe one in your yard, but not a whole forest.

Later the focus shifted to tiny wasps from Asia, which kill emerald ash borer eggs and larvae.

They help but don't completely get rid of EAB.

Overall, the outlook for ash trees in North America was still really dire.

Which brings us back to 2009 when Kathleen found that lone surviving ash tree.

She wants to know is this tree a possible solution?

So in 2010, she put a team together and they went out searching for more surviving trees and found them.

One person Kathleen wanted to tell was Jennifer Koch, a geneticist with the US Forest Service.

But she was pretty skeptical.

- Because of the data that was being reported, we were buying into the, yeah, nothing is gonna survive.

There's no resistance, because so many other scientists were saying that until we saw Kathleen's field data and the pictures that she took of the healthy trees that she found.

- [Dan] So Jennifer and her team come up with a hypothesis, and that is some ash trees in North America have a genetic resistance to the emerald ash borer, basically the ability to fight off EAB.

But Jennifer says that's just the hypothesis.

They need more data.

They come up with a term for these trees that's cautious but hopeful, lingering ash.

- It's kind of like, you know that last person that leaves the party, they just linger.

And you're just like, "Well, what are you doing here still?"

- [Dan] When Kathleen Knight would find a lingering ash, she'd take branches from it and bring them to Jennifer Koch's lab.

Jennifer would clone them and run a bunch of tests looking for genetic resistance.

And she found the trees not only had resistance, they actually killed EAB larvae.

And that was surprising.

- The mantra at the time was no co-evolution, no resistance.

Meaning that since this insect was from a whole nother continent and our trees didn't grow up exposed to them, that they didn't evolve any sort of mechanisms to defend themselves.

- Scientists didn't know what genetic trait made these ash trees resistant.

What they needed to find out was, did the ash trees pass the resistance down to their offspring?

- I guess that is the key piece of information you have to have to know that breeding is actually gonna work.

- [Dan] So Jennifer and her team cloned a bunch of different lingering ash and crossbred them.

The seedlings weren't just resistant to EAB; they were even more resistant than their parents.

- Now we're really starting to get excited.

I shouldn't say starting to get excited, but now we're convinced - [Dan] And that means their hypothesis is right.

Resistance to the emerald ash borer is genetic in some ash trees in North America.

Then comes the big task: actually saving the trees.

Jennifer needs to create an entire orchard of resistant ash to prove her lab results out in the field.

Her team will harvest the seeds from the most resistant trees and grow them into seedlings.

Eventually, those seedlings will be planted in forests across the region.

Jennifer says that could happen in the next decade.

This entire process can be replicated, helping spread resistant ash all across the continent.

- We're working with trees from Ohio and Michigan, so I can't take trees.

And the resistance seed they produce and plant them all the way down to Mississippi.

They won't be adapted to grow there.

So we have to do what we're doing over and over to make seed orchards for each separate region.

- [Dan] Back in a forest in central Ohio, Kathleen Knight continues to look for lingering ash today.

- More than half of the canopy looks great.

And then there's another tree right here to our left that also has a good healthy canopy.

So these are two that I'm hoping will make it through the second wave and continue to survive.

- [Dan] Kathleen is quick to point out in order to save the species across North America, they can't search for lingering ash alone.

- We need other people out there who are in the forest keeping an eye open, looking for large, surviving healthy ash trees, 'cause there's not enough of us to survey every forest.

And there are a lot of important trees out there that could be missed if people aren't watching for 'em.

- Despite it sometimes feeling like an uphill battle, Kathleen is optimistic about the future of ash trees.

- I mean, that's what gets me outta bed every day, is that the work is really important.

We're literally working to save multiple species of trees.

- [Dan] And not just the ash tree.

Other species too.

Because more catastrophic paths are gonna come along and now scientists will know: look for genetic resistance and those trees could also be saved.

(soft soothing music) - Our region's industries have been a source of pride, prosperity, and pollution.

When an important site is damaged, who pays to clean it up?

And who decides when the process is complete?

That question is being answered at Spirit Lake just upstream of Duluth.

Our friends at the Center for Global Environmental Education at Hamlin University sent us this story.

- [Narrator] In 1907, construction began on the largest industrial facility ever built in Duluth, Minnesota.

A massive US steel plant began to rise on a 1,200 acre site on the shores of Spirit Lake.

When its blast furnaces finally fired up eight years later, the plant began dumping highly toxic waste directly into the lake, a steady stream that flowed for 74 years.

The lake receiving this daily dose of untreated pollution was an ecological wonder, within one of the most biologically rich areas in the Great Lakes, the St. Louis River estuary, the largest freshwater estuary in the United States.

Spirit Lake also happened to be the very heart of the homeland of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

(speaking foreign language) - This is the center of all things.

All good things come from here.

This land here was truly paradise, if you will, for our people.

- [Narrator] The story of Spirit Lake raises important questions.

How should we use and care for nature's gifts?

What should we do when, in the name of progress, an unholy mess has been made of a sacred place that has nurtured an enduring culture?

Who's responsible and who should pay, and who decides when the healing work is done?

Spirit Lake offered spawning, nursery, and overwintering habitat for multiple fish species.

Aquatic vegetation in including extensive beds of wild rice, made the lake a haven for migrating waterfowl and shorebirds.

This abundance of life was extraordinary, even for the estuary where warm nutrient rich waters carrying sediment from upstream mixed with the cold nutrient poor waters of Lake Superior.

- And this estuary and this Gichi Ojibwe Gumi Zibi, the great sea of the Ojibwe is very, very important to us as a people, a survival of a people living in harmony, living in balance with all of creation.

- [Narrator] The new steel plant represented something else entirely.

An alternate view of human enterprise and the value and purpose of nature's bounty.

- [Announcer] Today's steel mills is the mightiest and most important machine ever to be turned by human hands.

And the story of the iron masters is more fabulous than any legend, more epic than any story out of Homer.

- [Narrator] City leaders were bullish about the new steel plant, which became the region's largest employer.

A company town, Morgan Park, was built in the shadow of the steel mill.

US Steel provided workers with places to shop, a new school, parks, and a community center.

Curving streets were lined with model homes made of concrete blocks from the cement factory that was part of the Duluth Works complex.

- There was a lot of interest in what Northern Minnesota had to offer from a natural resource perspective as our country was growing.

So logging came to the area, minerals were discovered,, and then the rails of course had to come in because the rails were also a way to transport this material out.

And one thing led to another and Duluth became the largest freshwater port in the world.

Significant habitat alteration happened in those years in the late 1800s, early 1900s, where the wetlands were filled and slips were carved to create the system that had provided for transport of raw materials.

There were tremendous logging mills and operations right down on the waterfront.

And that's part of the damage that occurred in that area is there were a lot of wood waste placed in a lot of these bays and rivulets in the estuary.

- [Narrator] By the mid 1800s, about the time this industrial activity was getting started, the Fond du Lac band had been removed from the estuary to a reservation 30 miles upstream.

Vast areas of their homeland were ceded to the US government through treaties that reserved for the band rights to hunt, fish, and gather in places like Spirit Lake.

- The reservation is referred to as the leftover.

And if you look at it, as far as its value to those that were here initially, I mean the land of the reservation, 40% of it is wetland.

And that's valuable to us.

We call that Mashiki, the medicine land, a place where you find your medicines.

But we also consider this our homelands as well.

- [Narrator] The very heart of those homelands includes Spirit Lake and Spirit Island, which hold a hallowed place in Ojibwe history.

That history tells of a migration by the tribe over many generations, a westward journey from the eastern seaboard.

- They would be where they were supposed to be when they found the food that grew up out of the water.

And that was manoomin or wild rice.

Spirit Island is the sixth stopping place on the Ojibwes migration through the Great Lakes.

And it continues to hold huge significance through the history and the cultural traditions that are even today continue to be practiced in that place.

- Sometimes I see all of the development over here in the estuary as an abomination.

- [Narrator] After decades of unchecked contamination from the steel plant, the 1960s and '70s brought change.

Demand for domestic steel declined and a growing environmental movement and new pollution laws threatened the economic viability of the Duluth Works plant.

US Steel began closing down operations and by 1979 the facility was fully shuttered.

A final group of 250 workers lost their jobs.

- Duluth Works US Steel was the best company that US Steel has ever had.

- [Interviewer] How come they closed it up?

- They made a mistake when they closed it up.

- [Narrator] Those families that remained in Morgan Park lived in the shadow of a rusting ruin that stood for another 10 years.

The reckoning began of how to make right the extensive damage that had been inflicted on Spirit Lake and who was responsible.

Duluth Works was designated as a Superfund site in 1984.

US Steel was on the hook for an initial cleanup that took 13 years.

But that was just the beginning.

- The job wasn't done.

There was still free product, oily substances, PAH's, heavy contamination that was bubbling up in the water and on the landscape.

- [Narrator] Though US Steel had built and managed the Duluth Works plant, the question of who was responsible for the mess it created wasn't quite so simple.

Before the plant was built, iron ore from the Mesabi Range had been shipped through the Great Lakes to Eastern steel mills.

Members of the Minnesota legislature realized that the state was missing out on a big opportunity.

- So in 1907, the Minnesota legislature passed a tax on the export of raw minerals out of Minnesota, thereby forcing US Steel to develop a steel mill on Spirit Lake in Duluth.

It was a state sponsored subsidized effort to get jobs in Duluth and to keep jobs in Minnesota.

So there is public sector complicity in the problems that occurred.

- [Narrator] The Environmental Protection Agency began planning the next phase of the cleanup with EPA and the steel companies sharing the costs.

As federal funds were now involved and because the plant was within the band's ceded territories, the EPA was required to get input from the Ojibwe about the cultural significance of the estuary's lands and waters and the special importance of Spirit Lake and Spirit Island.

- And that consultation led to some interesting dialogue between the tribal representatives and the EPA representatives where we did our best to educate them on what that cultural significance entailed.

- The Rock Nation.

In English, the rocks are inanimate.

In our language, in Ojibwe, they're animate.

They're alive, they have motion, they have spirit, they have power.

The Rock Nation came first, the mountains, the stone people.

Next was the seedlings, the grasses, the bushes, the trees.

They came next in order.

The seedlings, the grasses, the trees give us the oxygen to live.

And then next came the animals, the flyers, the four legged, the swimmers, the crawlers.

They came next.

They gave us their brotherhood.

Last was Anishinaabe.

We were lowered here.

We were put here from where?

I was told from the star world.

So we were last in that order of things.

So all those other being can live without us.

We can't live without them.

- [Nancy] We were strongly advocating for as much of that contamination to be dredged and removed from the water.

- Fond du Lac got partners together and we sat down around the table and put together this concept plan with the idea that we wanted to say, this is what we envision this place being like when the US Steel Remediation Project was going on.

- [Narrator] It took another 20 years for this second cleanup to play out as part of what became a massive effort to address pollution throughout the estuary, which had been designated one of the most degraded areas in the Great Lakes.

Overall costs reached about $1 billion and yet- - There's never enough.

You know, there's always something more to do.

And we were trying to define for this program, we need a finite list of things we have to do to get this designation removed and we can't keep adding to it, 'cause then we'll never be done.

And so that was part of the push and pull was to manage this plan with a known certain set of outcomes, get the funding and get it delivered.

- [Narrator] As sorely needed treatments have been applied to the estuary's most serious wounds, the band has continued to advocate for a healing of Spirit Lake that honors its cultural significance.

- [Nancy] I would estimate that the recently completed remedial project removed somewhere in the neighborhood of a third to a half of the volume of contaminated sediments.

The fact that there is this much toxic poison in the sediments, it affects nibi or water, which is considered the lifeblood of Mother Earth.

And as long as that contamination remained in the water, just that knowledge is enough to impact the cultural and historic and traditional integrity of Spirit Island.

- From that ecological standpoint, maybe we've reached the cleanup of contaminants to levels that are considered safe for people to be around.

But we certainly haven't addressed all of the impacts to the place.

- [Narrator] The EPA ultimately agreed that leaving so much polluted sediment in the water adversely impacted Spirit Island.

The agency gave funds to the band for them to work toward a more complete redemption of Spirit Lake.

By the summer of 2024, the cleanup involving EPA and US Steel had come to an end.

(clapping and cheering) In July, many of the parties to that process gathered to celebrate the opening of a trail that runs along the shore of Spirit Lake, past the former site of the steel plant.

- Our work is turning degraded waterfront areas into vibrant local attractions.

- Now we see a different view of what the natural resources and the outdoors are, their amenity, their quality of life.

- [Narrator] For the Fond du Lac band, the work continues.

- [Nancy] There's a heck of a lot that we can do that gets us back to a more historically healthy, ecologically functioning system.

The ability to come back down here and harvest rice again, to be able to come back and harvest fish.

This used to be a place where there were fish camps for Fond du Lac band members, 100, 200 years ago.

That's also how we heal our community.

- We have to share the Earth anyway, but we should share it in a reciprocal way where we respect one another and respect all of the gifts of God's creation, that benefits humanity and all of the animals and plants as well.

Human beings are the last order of creation.

Plants and so on were created before us.

All that they ask of us is to be grateful.

(soft soothing music) - Thanks for watching.

For more about the stories you see on our show, visit GreatLakesNow.org.

When you get there, you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates about our work.

See you out on the Lakes.

- [Announcer] This program was brought to you by the Fred and Barbara Erb Family Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at Detroit PBS, Polk Family Fund, DTE Foundation, and contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(music ending)